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Maxtor Brings SATA, NCQ and 16MB Cache to Play

AnandTech has a review of the new MaxLine III drive from Maxtor, which brings NCQ (Native Command Queuing) to the table when used with a controller that also uses NCQ. Along with NCQ, there's 16MB of cache, SATA and overall great performance from this drive.
The review has a lot of good things to say about the drive:

The MaXLine III performs just as well as any of the fastest desktop hard drives available today, but when used with an NCQ-enabling controller, the performance potential is improved tremendously.

Also:

The benefits to drive-based command reordering are easy to see on paper, but the fact that we were able to reproduce those benefits in a real world benchmark speaks volumes for the technology. As usage patterns become increasingly multithreaded/multitasking oriented, the performance impact of NCQ will improve even further.

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sAvAgE69
Unregistered

#30106 Posted on: 06/26/2004 04:41 AM
Too bad this product is Only for Windows and the 925 ICH6R Chipset I really think that people like Maxtor and Intel should make the driver for both(ALL) platforms, if people want to take advantage of it. Intel makes native drivers for other Operating systems why not this?

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Big B
Psychic or Psycho?

Posts: 3631
Joined: 2001-07-03

#30107 Posted on: 06/26/2004 06:47 AM
Has Intel come out and said they aren't gonna support Linux for the ICH6(WR) and i915/925?

It looks like I'm gonna have to read up on NCQ. Seems like an important technology, and I don't know jack about it yet.

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jhaislet
"Let's Roll"

Posts: 3248
Joined: 2002-06-25

#30108 Posted on: 06/26/2004 10:09 AM
Intel's little stunt with the 925 ICH6R Chipset being a "windows only" platform will drive the very customers they're trying to win back and/or keep with their new chipsets and soon to be released 64bit chips. Why on Earth, even with their consumer line of chipsets, would they impose limits on OS & drivers?

This in and of itself is almost monopolistic and could be considered "illegal bundling" of a product (requiring the purchase of additional products from another company in order to use first said product). This comes from a Supreme Court ruling of ''tying'' and is illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.Mini-ITX Systems: AOpen MP965-DR Core2Duo Mobility T7500 4MB L2, 4GB DDR2 (Vista MCE)| MSI Industrial 945GM2 Celeron M 430 | Intel Little Valley 2 (Firewall) | Via EPIA EN-1500 (Firewall)|

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duraid
Registered User

Posts: 378
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#30110 Posted on: 06/26/2004 08:44 PM

Originally posted by jhaislet Intel's little stunt with the 925 ICH6R Chipset being a "windows only" platform will drive the very customers they're trying to win back and/or keep with their new chipsets and soon to be released 64bit chips. Why on Earth, even with their consumer line of chipsets, would they impose limits on OS & drivers?

It looks like it's going to be supported in Linux very, very soon? (Of course, it already works in "I'm a dumb controller" mode)

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Forge
Registered User

Posts: 720
Joined: 2001-05-12

#30111 Posted on: 06/26/2004 11:15 PM
Intel has updated the nasty-hackjob 2.4.* ataraid pseudo-driver to support the ICH6R. Since a lot of the other great features in the 9*5/ICH6* chipsets are supported better or only while running the newer 2.6.* kernels, and the ataraid hackjob was removed there, I'm still waiting to see what Intel will do with 2.6.* and the new chipsets.

FWIW, I booted my existing Gentoo install which was running 2.6.6 with nearly no issues on the D925XCV. The onboard NIC (Marvell Yukon2 88E8050 PCIE) isn't supported yet, but that's Marvell/Syskonnect's problem, and the ICH6* aren't 100% functional. Sound doesn't even sort-of work, but all the core tech needed to get the system up and running is working fine. I'm trying to get a statement out of Intel WRT how much they're planning to invest in Linux support on the i9*5 chipsets. I'll post here if I get an official word.

FWIW, the ICH6R already works every bit as well as the ICH5R does.
Registered Linux user 82133 (li.org has a short memory)

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Mr Bill
two by two, hands of blue

Posts: 2939
Joined: 2002-02-16

#30112 Posted on: 06/27/2004 02:47 AM

Originally posted by jhaislet Intel's little stunt with the 925 ICH6R Chipset being a "windows only" platform will drive the very customers they're trying to win back and/or keep with their new chipsets and soon to be released 64bit chips. Why on Earth, even with their consumer line of chipsets, would they impose limits on OS & drivers?

Comment

"The MaXLine III vies with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 for the single-user speed title. Great performance, whisper-quiet operation, and high capacity make the MaXLine a compelling power user's drive.

Things are different when it comes to multi-user settings. The drive's high access times cause it to stumble in the heavily-random patterns experienced by servers. Though an appropriate NCQ controller may boost the drive's scores, its inherently slow actuator makes it unsuitable for anything more than the lightest of server applications.

That said, at the time of this writing, the MaXLine III's pricing remains unclear. Cost as well as the drive's relative reliability to existing fibre channel solutions will more than anything else ultimately determine the drive's success in its target market of nearline storage."

"2. Command queuing is meant to assist multi-user situations, not single-user setups. With the recent release of Intel's 9xx chipsets, pundits and enthusiasts everywhere have been proclaiming that command queuing is the next big thing for the desktop. Wrong. As evidenced by the disparities between the FastTrak S150 TX4 and TX4200 (otherwise identical except for the latter's added TCQ functionality), command queuing introduces significant overhead that fails to pay for itself performance-wise in the highly-localized, lower-depth instances that even the heaviest single-user multitasking generates. It is becoming clear, in fact, that the maturity and across-the-board implementation of TCQ in the SCSI world is one of the principal reasons why otherwise mechanically superior SCSI drives stumble when compared to ATA units. Consider that out of the 24 combinations yielded from the four single-user access patterns, one-to-four drive RAID0 arrays, and RAID1/10 mirrored arrays presented above, the non-TCQ S150 TX4 comes out on top in every case by a large margin. TCQ is only meant for servers, much like the technology mentioned just below."Overclocking is a blast!
Do I smell something burning?

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Tuan
Manwhore // y2khai poser

Posts: 55
Joined: 2002-07-05

#30114 Posted on: 06/28/2004 12:29 AM
NCQ isn't supported by any currently available SATA controllers except the ICH6. NCQ is a feature of the AHCI SATA spec and should be supported in future chipsets from every manufacturer.
Hi my name is Tuan i hear voices that tell me to burn things!
-Tuan
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NCQ is important in single-user setups in the real world to get both performance and data (filesystem) integrity. Modern (post-FAT) filesystems have various "hardening" strategies to protect the filesystem from corruption under various failure scenarios. All that I know of depend on ordered writes at some point; the OS depends on being able to write various filesystem metadata before writing structures that depend on that data.

For example, when a directory is created, space for the new directory is allocated, the new directory is initialized and then parent directory is updated to add a reference to the new directory. It is very important that the order in which these things are written to media is not changed; any reordering can result in a corrupt disk.

ATA disks have traditionally reordered writes to gain a performance advantage: the penalty of data loss in unusual situations is considered worthwhile to gain a substantial daily performance advantage. MS has posted various KB articles on the problem (which impacts NTFS). More modern no-log filesystems are probably at even greater risk than NTFS (since there are no large log writes that might flush the drive cache).

NCQ is a way to get nearly all of the performance that ATA drives now get while allowing reordering without risking data loss: with NCQ the OS can simply not issue an ordered write until a write it depends on has retired. The drive is still free to reorder and complete the NCQ write at will with respect to reads and unordered writes.